Again, you are talking about very specific and minor adjustments. Show me any game that is currently 'live' that doesn't have these type of adjustments being made all the time. Every patch of every game has similar things listed.
Tell me, what is your characters name on the beta servers? How far have you raided in beta? How long have you spent in Lake Wintergrasp in the beta?
Like I thought, you are not in beta and never have been. You have no idea how balanced things are and are just nitpiking minor adjustments that are made to every mmorpg, even after they are live.
I'd love to hear what game it is that you actually play and think is 'done'.
I agree that all games are in a constant state of evolution.
What I'm pointing out, however, is that with the new system, the consequences of being unbalanced are far more severe than they have been in the past or with the consequences of being unbalanced in many other MMOs. And hence the need to launch in a balanced way is so much more important.
I remember when WoW first came out, there were many delays, the attitude was "we won't launch it until it's done". In many ways, as a player I found that attitude reassuring. Similar delays were seen with TBC.
Nowadays the attitude seems to be "we have decided the launch schedule based on Christmas and Warhammer, we will launch at this date regardless of the results of testing". I find that less reassuring than the previous approach.
Originally posted by Antipathy I remember when WoW first came out, there were many delays, the attitude was "we won't launch it until it's done". In many ways, as a player I found that attitude reassuring. Similar delays were seen with TBC.Nowadays the attitude seems to be "we have decided the launch schedule based on Christmas and Warhammer, we will launch at this date regardless of the results of testing". I find that less reassuring than the previous approach.
I don't think you are quite right with that statement as WotLK was originally anticipated much earlier this year and Blizzard haven't announced a release date until they were sure it would be ready to go. There has to be a point at which you say "go" because if you sat in Beta for as long as it took to please everyone you wouldn't see a release at all.
Will they get it completely right from the off, well maybe not, but it has to go to the general public at some time to properly gauge where the balance changes are really affecting people. I am sure that they have a huge database of all the changes that have been made and the changes that they are considering and as you have conceded yourself, balance is always a work in progress, so lets get it out there and if changes need to be made at a later date, so be it.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
The log has been put together by Fusion. Some of you may know them as one of the current top raiding guilds. They have cleared BT in a time of one hour 50 minutes (second fastest recorded time ever), and have also cleared Sunwell. I think we can take it as read that all members of this guild are highly skillful players.
However, when I look at the DPS logs above, the hunters and mages are fairly consistently at the top of damage done, however the elemental shaman never breaks into the top five, and is often only contributing half of the DPS of the top characters. Shadow priest DPS is also very low (in the fights where shadow priests are used).
Ok, you asked for combat logs, here's one: http://www.reawakenguild.com/foo/sws/ The log has been put together by Fusion. Some of you may know them as one of the current top raiding guilds. They have cleared BT in a time of one hour 50 minutes (second fastest recorded time ever), and have also cleared Sunwell. I think we can take it as read that all members of this guild are highly skillful players. However, when I look at the DPS logs above, the hunters and mages are fairly consistently at the top of damage done, however the elemental shaman never breaks into the top five, and is often only contributing half of the DPS of the top characters. Shadow priest DPS is also very low (in the fights where shadow priests are used). This doesn't look like balance to me.
what your failing to factor in is the boss encounter... its rare on a raid for melee such as elem shammies to top range dealers like hunters or mages as often a boss fight requires melee to move around more, to stop attacking or move away from the boss depending on what is happening.. where as range can happily fire away. also if a boss fight has several adds, the meleee and some range will be spread out to deal with those thus not contributing at that time to the DPS on the boss.
As an example of it being released too early, consider the following blue post from only two weeks ago: - Trap Mastery - This will now be the 41-point Survival talent. Granted, not very sexy for a 41-pointer but we'll do some changes there in a future patch (after WOLK ships).
So they redesigned the hunter survival tree. They know they haven't finished. They know it doesn't work. And yet they'll still ship.
Not like they have looked at it once and said "oh that will do". They have, like all classes remade the talent trees countless times. And they have just got to a point with this "1" talent out of about "25" talents in the survival tree where they are out of ideas and will wait for the game to ship and see how it plays on the live servers.
Its a 1 point talent that is ok, not great but ok "+30% duration on your traps".
Its hardly a reason to delay the launch... but speaking as some 1 in beta .. *ahem* unlike the OP *ahem* its ready to go now.
what your failing to factor in is the boss encounter... its rare on a raid for melee such as elem shammies to top range dealers like hunters or mages as often a boss fight requires melee to move around more, to stop attacking or move away from the boss depending on what is happening.. where as range can happily fire away. also if a boss fight has several adds, the meleee and some range will be spread out to deal with those thus not contributing at that time to the DPS on the boss. See where I am going.
I think you should spend more time thinking about your replies, and looking at the logs.
Elemental shaman are ranged DPS. As are shadow priests. Just the same as the hunters and mages who are topping the meters.
And my point was that they didn't fare poorly in just one boss fight, but in every boss fight.
It is my opinion that these changes are centered squarely around 10 man dungeons and not 25 man raids. I am willing to be that there are far more people that play the 10 man raids than the 25 and these changes make forming groups of 10 much easier than prior to it.
Even though 25 sized raids get more flexibility out of the deal, the changes very much favor 10 man raids. Add on top of that the new dual specialization system makes things even better.
I do agree with the original poster however that there are going to be balance issues. I just don't think those are something that can be hashed out in a controlled beta. The masses of people playing a game have a way of thinking outside the box and creating their own methods and best practices that just cannot be anticipated all the time.
It's really hard to convince someone not in beta that beta is fine.
I play a moonkin, and I know that on certain bosses my dps drops fairly low because for a good portion of certain boss fights, i'm throwing up heal over time spells. The same is true for most shadow priest and elemetal shaman.
it's kinda the same way on certain fights a mages dps will drop if they are on 'sheep detail'. You can't handpick a certain boss fight and then say it proves your point.
The overall dps of dps classes are very very similar when you look over the entire length of a raid. Hunters currently do a bit more dps than most others becuase their big utility (traps) occurs before the fight starts, so they lose less 'fight time' compared to some other classes. But even then, the 'best' of the dps classes is doing like 3% more dps than the 'worst' over the course of an entire dungeon. The fluctuations will be much greater if you look at an individual fight.
but again, it's pointless trying to explain this to someone who isn't raidiing in beta
it's kinda the same way on certain fights a mages dps will drop if they are on 'sheep detail'. You can't handpick a certain boss fight and then say it proves your point. The overall dps of dps classes are very very similar when you look over the entire length of a raid.
How many times do I have to say it. The elemental shaman and shadow priest did poor dps on every single boss fight. Not just on selected fights. On every fight.
Besides - the elemental shaman didn't do more than 1% healing in any fight. So he didn't waste much time on healing.
It may well be that things are fine for Moonkins Azrile, and they may be fine for you, but they aren't fine for everyone.
Chilton went on to describe some of the tuning they're doing on high-level talents. "One thing that we've found is that some of the talents aren't as usable as we'd like them to be. [Mages] have their 51 point talents in all the different trees are like living bombs of fire tree, deep freeze tree, the arcane barrage for the arcane tree, and we're going to be massaging a lot of those. We're doing some of our early DPS testing and we're finding that the class does way more damage than we anticipated it would do like by a factor of two. So we'll be looking into why that's happening and making some adjustments based on that. And that's the case with a lot of different classes. We have some work to do on the shaman, we have some work to do on warlocks and warriors, so there's a lot of stuff to be done to get it into final shipping condition
So even Blizzard seem to admit that Wotlk isn't ready. And yet they'll still releasing it...
Comments
Again, you are talking about very specific and minor adjustments. Show me any game that is currently 'live' that doesn't have these type of adjustments being made all the time. Every patch of every game has similar things listed.
Tell me, what is your characters name on the beta servers? How far have you raided in beta? How long have you spent in Lake Wintergrasp in the beta?
Like I thought, you are not in beta and never have been. You have no idea how balanced things are and are just nitpiking minor adjustments that are made to every mmorpg, even after they are live.
I'd love to hear what game it is that you actually play and think is 'done'.
I agree that all games are in a constant state of evolution.
What I'm pointing out, however, is that with the new system, the consequences of being unbalanced are far more severe than they have been in the past or with the consequences of being unbalanced in many other MMOs. And hence the need to launch in a balanced way is so much more important.
I remember when WoW first came out, there were many delays, the attitude was "we won't launch it until it's done". In many ways, as a player I found that attitude reassuring. Similar delays were seen with TBC.
Nowadays the attitude seems to be "we have decided the launch schedule based on Christmas and Warhammer, we will launch at this date regardless of the results of testing". I find that less reassuring than the previous approach.
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I don't think you are quite right with that statement as WotLK was originally anticipated much earlier this year and Blizzard haven't announced a release date until they were sure it would be ready to go. There has to be a point at which you say "go" because if you sat in Beta for as long as it took to please everyone you wouldn't see a release at all.
Will they get it completely right from the off, well maybe not, but it has to go to the general public at some time to properly gauge where the balance changes are really affecting people. I am sure that they have a huge database of all the changes that have been made and the changes that they are considering and as you have conceded yourself, balance is always a work in progress, so lets get it out there and if changes need to be made at a later date, so be it.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Ok, you asked for combat logs, here's one:
http://www.reawakenguild.com/foo/sws/
The log has been put together by Fusion. Some of you may know them as one of the current top raiding guilds. They have cleared BT in a time of one hour 50 minutes (second fastest recorded time ever), and have also cleared Sunwell. I think we can take it as read that all members of this guild are highly skillful players.
However, when I look at the DPS logs above, the hunters and mages are fairly consistently at the top of damage done, however the elemental shaman never breaks into the top five, and is often only contributing half of the DPS of the top characters. Shadow priest DPS is also very low (in the fights where shadow priests are used).
This doesn't look like balance to me.
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what your failing to factor in is the boss encounter... its rare on a raid for melee such as elem shammies to top range dealers like hunters or mages as often a boss fight requires melee to move around more, to stop attacking or move away from the boss depending on what is happening.. where as range can happily fire away. also if a boss fight has several adds, the meleee and some range will be spread out to deal with those thus not contributing at that time to the DPS on the boss.
See where I am going.
Not like they have looked at it once and said "oh that will do". They have, like all classes remade the talent trees countless times. And they have just got to a point with this "1" talent out of about "25" talents in the survival tree where they are out of ideas and will wait for the game to ship and see how it plays on the live servers.
Its a 1 point talent that is ok, not great but ok "+30% duration on your traps".
Its hardly a reason to delay the launch... but speaking as some 1 in beta .. *ahem* unlike the OP *ahem* its ready to go now.
I think you should spend more time thinking about your replies, and looking at the logs.
Elemental shaman are ranged DPS. As are shadow priests. Just the same as the hunters and mages who are topping the meters.
And my point was that they didn't fare poorly in just one boss fight, but in every boss fight.
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It is my opinion that these changes are centered squarely around 10 man dungeons and not 25 man raids. I am willing to be that there are far more people that play the 10 man raids than the 25 and these changes make forming groups of 10 much easier than prior to it.
Even though 25 sized raids get more flexibility out of the deal, the changes very much favor 10 man raids. Add on top of that the new dual specialization system makes things even better.
I do agree with the original poster however that there are going to be balance issues. I just don't think those are something that can be hashed out in a controlled beta. The masses of people playing a game have a way of thinking outside the box and creating their own methods and best practices that just cannot be anticipated all the time.
It's really hard to convince someone not in beta that beta is fine.
I play a moonkin, and I know that on certain bosses my dps drops fairly low because for a good portion of certain boss fights, i'm throwing up heal over time spells. The same is true for most shadow priest and elemetal shaman.
it's kinda the same way on certain fights a mages dps will drop if they are on 'sheep detail'. You can't handpick a certain boss fight and then say it proves your point.
The overall dps of dps classes are very very similar when you look over the entire length of a raid. Hunters currently do a bit more dps than most others becuase their big utility (traps) occurs before the fight starts, so they lose less 'fight time' compared to some other classes. But even then, the 'best' of the dps classes is doing like 3% more dps than the 'worst' over the course of an entire dungeon. The fluctuations will be much greater if you look at an individual fight.
but again, it's pointless trying to explain this to someone who isn't raidiing in beta
How many times do I have to say it. The elemental shaman and shadow priest did poor dps on every single boss fight. Not just on selected fights. On every fight.
Besides - the elemental shaman didn't do more than 1% healing in any fight. So he didn't waste much time on healing.
It may well be that things are fine for Moonkins Azrile, and they may be fine for you, but they aren't fine for everyone.
D&D Home Page - What Class Are You? - Build A Character - D&D Compendium
Here's another quote I've just seen:
Chilton went on to describe some of the tuning they're doing on high-level talents. "One thing that we've found is that some of the talents aren't as usable as we'd like them to be. [Mages] have their 51 point talents in all the different trees are like living bombs of fire tree, deep freeze tree, the arcane barrage for the arcane tree, and we're going to be massaging a lot of those. We're doing some of our early DPS testing and we're finding that the class does way more damage than we anticipated it would do like by a factor of two. So we'll be looking into why that's happening and making some adjustments based on that. And that's the case with a lot of different classes. We have some work to do on the shaman, we have some work to do on warlocks and warriors, so there's a lot of stuff to be done to get it into final shipping condition
So even Blizzard seem to admit that Wotlk isn't ready. And yet they'll still releasing it...
D&D Home Page - What Class Are You? - Build A Character - D&D Compendium